2020 | short-movie
New York: 16th March 2020.
When Covid-19 broke into New York people everyday life normality, as a concept, arose as the condition to return to.
But what we talk about when we talk about normality?
normality shows how the current state of exception is based upon multiple, questionable but established conditions.
normality aims at reflecting the basic structures and the foundations of what we consider normal.
Eventually, in light of what is now happening and it will happen, normality aims at instigating further argumentation on how we define, establish and apply our idea of normality.
credits:
original text / Silvia Susanna
Director of Photography / Silvia Susanna
First Camera Assistant / Simone Montacci
Second Camera Assistant / Gabriele Camilli
Original Music / Giuseppe Canegiallo
Proofreading Subtitles / Sara Aoun, Katia Abi Gerges (fra), Faye Yue (chn), Silvia Susanna (ita)
completion date: 05.04.2020
presentation / SPAN agency Italy
world premiere / NòtFilmFest Italy
online release / DAMN Magazine Belgium
included in the First Season / Terrarista TV online streaming channel
screening / Avalanche Art Space Massachusetts, USA
honorable mention / Deep Focus Film Festival New York, USA
selection / WēVē TV New York, USA
blog
New York: 16th March 2020.
When Covid-19 broke into New York people everyday life normality, as a concept, arose as the condition to return to.
But what we talk about when we talk about normality?
normality shows how the current state of exception is based upon multiple, questionable but established conditions.
normality aims at reflecting the basic structures and the foundations of what we consider normal.
Eventually, in light of what is now happening and it will happen, normality aims at instigating further argumentation on how we define, establish and apply our idea of normality.
credits:
original text / Silvia Susanna
Director of Photography / Silvia Susanna
First Camera Assistant / Simone Montacci
Second Camera Assistant / Gabriele Camilli
Original Music / Giuseppe Canegiallo
Proofreading Subtitles / Sara Aoun, Katia Abi Gerges (fra), Faye Yue (chn), Silvia Susanna (ita)
completion date: 05.04.2020
presentation / SPAN agency Italy
world premiere / NòtFilmFest Italy
online release / DAMN Magazine Belgium
included in the First Season / Terrarista TV online streaming channel
screening / Avalanche Art Space Massachusetts, USA
honorable mention / Deep Focus Film Festival New York, USA
selection / WēVē TV New York, USA
blog

Home Cultural Home
july 2019 | public eventA debate on the birth, development and goals of specific programs with a cultural vocation, established in inhabited houses and led by its dwellers.
In an extended confrontation between the protagonists of these initiatives and some experts in related fields, the talk aimed at tackling topics like cohabitation with art, the cultural production, the social spaces and everyday life between dwelling and environment and tourism.
The talk aimed at bringing out meanings and values generated by these projects and the consequent spatial, social, cultural, economic and political effects.
Home Cultural Home was part of Demanio Marittimo a summer event dedicated to arts and Architecture curated by Pippo Ciorra e Cristiana Colli
participants:
Giovanni Gaggia / Artista, Performer, Fondatore di Casa Sponge (Pergola)
Alvise Giacomazzi / Architetto, Fondatore di 2.73 (Venezia)
Tobia Tomasi / Promotore Culturale, Fondatore di Casa Punto Croce (Venezia, Italia)
Jean Lorin / Ricercatore, scrittore, artista e performer Fondatore di Lorgean Theatre and homemade culture
Alessandro Fonte / Architetto, Artista, Membro di nanotourism
Beatrice Meoni / Artista
event curated by Cristiana Colli e Pippo Ciorra artribune.com
Home Tours
in progress | agencywith Alessandro Fonte, Ottonie von Roeder, Anastasia Eggers
Home Tours is a travel agency that offers de-touristic experiences at the traveller’s own home. After asking a few questions about personal idea of a vacation, Home Tours creates a customized tour for each traveler/home: an experience that takes place within the four walls but guides the traveler to unexpected places and trigger exhilarating thoughts, leading to a completely new way of encountering the most known place: home.
Home Tours is an experimental project by Alessandro Fonte, Anastasia Eggers, Ottonie von Roeder and Silvia Susanna.
The project is supported by Goethe Institut Milan and funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This measure is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget decided by the Saxon state parliament.











The Picnic Pavilion
2019 | Parallel
the 58th International Art Exhibition May
You Live In Interesting Times
co-curated with Gabriel Adams, Isadora Tomasi and Tobia Tomasi in collaboration with Casa Punto Croce, Venice (Italy)
The Picnic Pavilion was a rogue, experimental, exhibition combined with a series of events which re-contextualize artistic practice and art tourism in the heart of Venice during the 58th International Art Exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times, known as La Biennale di Venezia 2019.
The Picnic Pavilion acted as a platform to generate and realize new works within the city. It aimed at breaking the consumer based miasma which often accompanies visits to Venice through artistic actions. The ethos of The Picnic Pavilion was to contribute to the quality of everyday life in Venice, as well as to our humanity in general.
Why? Did you know that it is illegal to picnic in Venice?
Although all great ideas came about while either cooking or eating together, the Venetian public decorum has forbidden it. Therefore, we used the picnic as a symbolic form for a public and convivial program in order to re-contextualize artistic practice and art tourism in the heart of Venice during the Venice Art Biennale.
While the outside world looked with endless adoration on La Biennale di Venezia, the reality of the city and its inhabitants have a different story. They have to coexist with both Disneylandification and environmental degradation, all accompanied by the visitors’ delirious pressure of “I can’t miss it.”
The Picnic Pavilion offered the cure, or at least some shelter from this storm, with its inherent delirium! The Picnic Pavilion took on Art and invigorates the simple ritual moments of daily life where we come together to share a meal. In addition to the mix of contemporary art, urban projects, and interventions into city social life, an ongoing series of collaborative culinary events (such as picnics, dinner parties, apero, events) will take place within the experimental and underground ~ but above water ~ Casa Punto Croce.
Casa Punto Croce is an experimental cultural program in Venice which has been taking place in an inhabited apartment for 7 years. Born from the need to generate informal events, spontaneous exhibitions, and instinctive performances, its impetuous projects have made waves across the cultural Venetian agenda.
Participants within the Picnic Pavilion responded to an open call by presenting their work, making event or happening, creating or participating in a cooking project, or organising a picnic as an open invitation to art.
The Picnic Pavilion was an auto-produced, user generated project that operated on the engagement of all participants, both the artists and the audience. Outside of the exhibition and opening event, the project operated on improvisation and self driven initiatives.
Collectively we made this project what it was, but a huge thanks has to be addressed to the project Pranzetto by Gabriel Adams, and to Punto Croce without them the all Picnic Pavilion wouldn’t exist.
pictures by Rossella Damiani and Gabriel Adams
Report from [Home at Arsenale]
a curated library addressing the notions of home and dwelling
Pavilion of Slovenia at the 15. Architecture Venice Biennale
THE LIBRARIAN PERSPECTIVE
project commissioned by Matevž Čelik
curators Aljoša Dekleva and Tina Gregorič
curators’ assistant and librarian Silvia Susanna



1.2._picture by Flavio Coddou
3._picture by Uroš Rustja
Temporary curated collections are never universal visions, but occasions for materially inhabiting some argumentations.
In the case of [Home at Arsenale], the argumentation was the notions of home and dwelling, the collection was a library curated by 27 participants** invited to tackle these notions through a selection of books and, the occasion was the 15. Venice Biennale where the Slovenian Pavilion doesn’t have a house. Why? When around 1907 Biennale aimed at transforming Giardini into an international exhibition, it established a collaboration with the nations with which had stable relations; at that time, Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. In 1988 Biennale declared the lack of exhibition space in Giardini. Three years later, when Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia, there was no more space in Giardini for a house. At the beginning of the XXI century, a growing participation request generates a new coordination which allows the integration of official and collateral presences within the city provoking from 1995 a real estate system connected to the national pavilions out of Giardini.1
From these premises, [Home at Arsenale] materialized as a curated library addressing the notions of home and dwelling through a wooden structure made for inhabiting and opening up vibrant debates on the idea of home and the implications of dwelling.
The collection of books emerged as the combination of diverse curatorial decisions coming from the positions of the 27 invited participants*. Following Warburg’s library principle, I arranged the books according to a series of possible dialogues among books’ content, beyond the books’ genre and participants’ lists. However, visitors were free to browse, read, photograph and relocate the volumes and welcome to extract, readdress as well as criticize, revision, or re-contextualize narratives, ideas, concepts, theories, methods, tools, practices, projects reported in the books, among them, with me or, during the public events, with the invited participants. So in the end, as Michel de Certeau affirmed, the text got meaning in relation to the reader: “Whether it is a question of newspapers or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control.”2
Accordingly, the collection of books reflected sources, references, and ideas of the invited participants. Visitors, thanks to labels and the booklet, could relate each book, to each participant position, sometimes converging in the same book, and to the overall list. Each book materially and speculatively embodied the unit of the pavilion both as a paradigmatic object for confronting the idea of home in its bodily realm and cultural, linguistic, immaterial, symbolic sphere; and as a link among all the people engaged in the project.
On a physical level, books - mainly made of paper and written human language - reflect precise contextual conditions (time and space). Through their material structure: the paper, binding, and printing they physically transmit aims and significances for which they have been made. In Europe, before the movable type invention (1455) the book was a precious artisanal, hand-made product. With Gutenberg, it became the vehicle of the Protestant Reform and French Revolution. Today, from a digital perspective, either as a cheap pocket volume or as an art publication is primarily recognized as an offline media.
The digitation process dissolved its materiality and facilitated a faster free production as well as a wider distribution of texts. But rather than instigating some fetishistic battles for the preservation of book as object, I think it’s necessary to consider as the media theorist, and philosopher Boris Groys explained in an article3 that: “there is a tension between our material, physical, corporeal mode of existence - which is temporary and subjected to time - and our inscription into cultural archives that are much more stable than our own bodies. (...)” And certainly, we still have to confront with them.
On the other hand, books witness and report a wide range of discourses produced in different times and distinct geographical areas and as Foucault noted, “is a false unity, and its boundaries are unstable and permeable. The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut. Every book is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network and its unity is variable and relative, we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity”3.
A strong node of [Home at Arsenale] network was The Poetics of Space as it was the most selected book. In his essay, published in 1957, Gaston Bachelard wrote about the influences of the poetic imagination through the space. He wrote: (…) our house is our corner of the world (…) it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. (…)”.
Nowadays, empathising with such a statement corresponds to sincerely question ourselves as inhabitants first and as architects later: how and in which conditions are we establishing our first universe? Of course, this is a big question to which this modest text can not certainly answer, but some tracks can be found in the language, the origin of the words and, in their semantic drift. In English, the distinction between home and house is on the material level, home refers to the abstract knowledge while house refers to the quantifiable condition. Interestingly, in more ancient western languages this distinction is more precise and let emerge also the political and social understanding of the western civilizations. For instance, in Latin "Domus" designates not only the building, but also the social entity embodied by the owner the "dominus", while “Aedes” expressed the physical entity. Like "Domus", the Greek "oìkos" (the basic unit of society in most Greek city-states) indicates not only the building, but also the family and the owned property that included slaves, animals and so on. It is in fact, from Oikos that comes the "Oikos-nomia": the discipline that deals with the administration of the house. Although hidden in the root of other apparently distant words, the concept of home and house in these two indoeuropean languages has its foundations in the economic and political sphere, as well as in the social and cultural ideas established in the western contexts.
If today I anchor my reflection on these notions, “establishing our first universe as a real cosmos in every sense of the word” means socially, politically and physically confronting, experiencing and answering to the current specific and global conditions resulting from these forces. From this perspective, any spatial expressions, either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organized form, has an impact on the inhabitant imagination, both in relation with their relative social, cultural and political contexts, but also as part of the global economical system. Thus the Palestinian camps reported in the books of Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal or the housing program of Tlatelco by Mario Pani for settling 100.000 inhabitants, or the speculative Buckminster Fuller ideas in Space, or the series of architecture revealed in The Un-private House are, first of all, material translations of a taken-position in specific territories where local and global forces clash, and material and virtual spaces overlap.
It is very important in fact to not dismiss the impact of the virtual space on the physical one. Despite its intangibility, the virtual space is not so abstract. The sociologist Saskia Sassen explained how the highly digitised complex of economic operations benefitted from the physical concentration of local intermediation systems that gave birth to what she called Global Cities. This urban phenomenon emerged during the 80’s by this rapidly expanding and increasingly networked sectors, but also by neo-liberal political positions that deregulated, privatised and expulsed land and people from the system.
A discourse that somehow reports to our premises and certainly for concluding toThe Production of Space where Henri Lefebvre affirmed that “(…) Our knowledge of the material world is based on the concepts defined in terms of the broadest generality and the greatest scientific (i.e. having a content) abstraction. Even if the links between these concepts and the physical realities to which they correspond are not always clearly established, we do know that such links exist and that the concepts or theories they imply - energy, space, time - can be neither conflated nor separated from one another. (…) When we evoke 'energy', we must immediately note that energy has to be deployed within a space. When we evoke 'space', we must immediately indicate: what occupies that space and how it does so: the deployment of energy in relation to 'points' and within a time frame. When we evoke 'time', we must immediately say what it is that moves or changes in isolation is an empty abstraction, likewise energy and time. (…) If indeed spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise. (…)”.
<post scriptum>
Six months spent at [Home at Arsenale] undoubtedly made up a period that I can frame it as home. I especially enjoyed diving into never-ending readings because continually interrupted by a myriad of discussions with people, visitors, lovers and critics (my favorite) to this temporary architecture. I can't say what my favorite title was, but many of the books mentioned in this text have been certainly important references. However, I think that the dark side of the pavilion played a special role in my experience, its presence reminded me that the absence of ideas, those that have not emerged, or that need to be defined, occupy a space that needs to be discovered, sometimes invented. Agamben, in his essay What is the contemporary? 4 said that to experience contemporaneity: it is necessary to feel the gap. "Contemporary is the person who receives in the full face the bundle of the darkness of his time". And in the darkness, we have to look at.
*full list at the end of the page
1. I Giardini: Topografia di uno spazio espositivo
Federica Martini, Vittoria Martini article part of
Venezia Venezia, 55 Esposizione Internazionale d'arte La Biennale di Venezia, Padiglione del Cile, 2013, Barcelona
2. The Practice of Everydaylife
(L'invention du Quotidien)
Michel De Certau, 1980 Paris
2. The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archeologie du Savoir)
Michel Foucault, 1969 Paris
3. Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk
Boris Grois, 2013 e-flux Journal #50
4. What is the contemporary? (Che cos'è il contemporaneo?)
Giorgio Agamben, 2008 Milan
*
Stephen Bates / SERGISON BATES architects / UK
Matija Bevk, Vasa J. Perović / BEVK PEROVIĆ architects / Slovenia
Tatiana Bilbao / TATIANA BILBAO ESTUDIO, architect / Mexico
Jan Boelen / Z33, curator / Belgium
Dominique Boudet / architecture critic / France
Arno Brandlhuber / BRANDLHUBER+, architect / Germany
Aljoša Dekleva, Tina Gregorič / dekleva gregorič architects /
Slovenia Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Mauricio Pezo / PEZO VON ELLRICHSHAUSEN, artists and architects / Chile Jesko Fezer / IFAU UND JESKO FEZER, architect / Germany
Konstantin Grcic / KGID, designer / Germany
Juan Herreros / ESTUDIO HERREROS, architect / Spain
Tomaž Krištof / STUDIO KRIŠTOF, architect / Slovenia
Jan Liesegang / RAUMLABORBERLIN, architect / Germany
Hrvoje Njirić / NJIRIC+ arhitekti / Croatia
Michael Obrist / FELD72, architect / Austria / Italy
Rok Oman, Špela Videčnik / OFIS architects / Slovenia
Marjetica Potrč / architect and artist / Slovenia / Germany
Pascale and Christian Pottgiesser / CHRISTIAN POTTGIESSER ARCHITECTURESPOSSIBLES, architects / France
Alice Rawsthorn / design critic / UK
Emmanuel Rubio / literary and architecture critic / France
Jurij Sadar, Boštjan Vuga / SADAR+VUGA, architects / Slovenia
Irénée Scalbert / architecture critic / UK / France
Brett Steele / AA, architect and architectural editor / UK
Yui Tezuka, Takaharu Tezuka / TEZUKA architects / Japan
TYIN tegnestue / architects / Norway
Aleš Vodopivec / architect / Slovenia
Maruša Zorec / ARREA, architect / Slovenia